Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

Yeah well last year we had a little TS Lee drop 15 inches of rain us in a few days. We were out of power/internet for 3 days, unable to leave town due to flooded roads for 4 days and had no water for 10 days as the water plant was submerged. This is 2.5 hours west of NYC into PA. Well inland - its not wind its the concern for the rain and worries that the storm might just stall out and park into day 5-6.
We just came around the anniversary of the storm and people are taking it seriously here. No its not a hurricane, but a massive pile of rain is bad enough.

narramissic writes "'Hundreds and hundreds of documents about government contracts,' were found on a hard drive purchased at a market in Ghana for the bargain basement price of $40, said Peter Klein, an associate professor with the University of British Columbia, who led an investigation into the global electronic waste business for the PBS show Frontline. The hard drive had belonged to U.S. government contractor Northrop Grumman and in a made-for-TV ironic twist, 'some of the documents talked about how to recruit airport screeners and several of them even covered data security practices,' Klein said. 'Here were these contracts being awarded based on their ability to keep the data safe.'"Link to Original Source

GamerDNA is trying out what they call their Discovery Engine, a system that uses metadata from users to classify games and identify which have similar traits. Massively describes it thus: "Once the gamerDNA community continues to contribute to something like this, it builds up an enormous database of terminology based on actual player knowledge, not just shiny PR words thrown together to promote a game. These search terms can end up being unique to a specific genre, and ultimately lead gamers to exactly the types of games they're looking for." GamerDNA tested the system out on some of the popular MMOs, and they've posted the results. They look at how MMO players identify themselves within the game, how they describe the setting, and what basic descriptive phrases they use in reference to the games.

Destructoid is running an opinion piece looking at the state of the survival-horror genre in games, suggesting that the way it has developed over the past several years has been detrimental to its own future. "During the nineties, horror games were all the rage, with Resident Evil and Silent Hill using the negative aspects of other games to an advantage. While fixed camera angles, dodgy controls and clunky combat were seen as problematic in most games, the traditional survival horror took them as a positive boon. A seemingly less demanding public ate up these games with a big spoon, overlooking glaring faults in favor of videogames that could be genuinely terrifying." The Guardian's Games Blog has posted a response downplaying the decline of the genre, looking forward to Ubisoft's upcoming I Am Alive and wondering if independent game developers will pick up where major publishers have left off.

teknikl (539522) writes "In a major update today, Jagex has modified the rules of the online Java-based fantasy MMOG Runescape to further exclude gold farmers and real world traders. Earlier this month http://news.runescape.com/newsitem.ws?id=995 , the rules for dueling were changed to restrict the maximum a player could win to 3k. In addition, the rules for drop parties were changed to announce high value drop parties http://news.runescape.com/newsitem.ws?id=998 . As of today the 'Wilderness' area of the game was modified to prevent surreptitious trades via PKing. Other rules governing the visibility of dropped items more expensive than 3k also went into place today http://news.runescape.com/newsitem.ws?id=1007 with further restrictions on 'unbalanced trades' expected in the coming year.

Today the RuneScape community is in the midst of a social meltdown, complete with hordes of players protesting in the streets. A concerned player asks, at what point does the pain of the cure outweigh the benefits? What are the rights of players participating in any online community? While other games tend to look the other way, Jagex has taken RWT head-on, will this cost the company its flagship game?"